The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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9:28am on Thursday, 27th August, 2026:
Weird
Although Volume I of the Second Edition of my book Designing Virtual Worlds is available, the First Edition continues to to be published.
Now, you might wonder why it's published when within two weeks of my releasing a free .pdf of the content in 2021 (with the publisher's permission), a hundred thousand people downloaded a copy. More continue to do so: there were 16,088 downloads from my web site alone last month, although those could all be by web-scraping bots as far as I know, of course. Nevertheless, it raises the question: why would anyone pay for the book, other than liking to have a nice, bound, hard copy?
Well, the answer is that one of the people who downloaded the .pdf ran it through a translation program and sells the resulting Chinese version for £54.19 on Amazon. If you don't read English but do read Chinese, that's why you'd buy it.
I don't know if anyone has actually bought it. If they haven't, I guess that gets the author (one "(MEI)Richard A. Bartle BIAN ZHU") off the hook for violating the CC BY-NC-ND Creative Commons Licence 4.0 that prohibits its use for commercial purposes.
I don't have proof that it was AI-translated, by the way. However, given that the description of its content is "From the creation and design of the virtual world. players and life. ethics and aesthetics-oriented. virtual" this does look to be the most likely means of creation.
I was tempted to buy a copy myself to look at, but didn't. The name of the publisher, Red Flag Publishing House, was something of a red flag.
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Copyright © 2026 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).